Monday, August 31, 2015

< Isaac > ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ < /Isaac >

One day during summer 2014, I got crazy sick. Skipped work. Put my life on hold. Laid in bed all day. But did I skip the Fictionist concert that evening? Duh no.

My name is Isaac. I'm a computer programmer and I tend to think like an engineer; I don't really fit the English major mold. But I'm here and I probably won't go away even if you tell me to, so there.

As far as the Renaissance goes, I think I'm in favor of it. I like Shakespeare a lot (I'm genuinely jazzedthat we'll be studying Hamlet). My all-time favorite homework assignment involved memorizing and acting out one of Claudius's soliloquies. I would tell you that it was a life-changing experience, but if you don't automatically disbelieve that every time you hear it from a college student, you're probably not skeptical enough. Anyway, it was awesome.

Aside from the bard, my experience is limited. I can kick it with Donne and Montaigne if I have to. I think Donne's "The Flea" is excellent from basically every perspective: religious devotional poem, seduce-ish love poem, blood-and-guts poem, making-people-uncomfortable poem, and those are all the perspectives I'm aware of at this point in my education.

I'll be frank about my experience with eBooks (as if I'm hedgy about other things). I've found eBooks to be generally of a much lower quality than regular books from, you know, Random House or HarperCollins. And I've always looked down my nose (which isn't that hard with a nose like mine) at people who take on the title of "author" after self-publishing a book. One kid in my high school "published" a fantasy novel that he was really proud of. I tried to read a couple pages of it. It was just the worst. That was how I learned that there's no minimum standard for self-published works.

A point for optimism: There is a substantial body of high-quality self-published work online (blogs, online news media, open-source code, etc.) that I have a high respect for. Therefore, high-quality eBooks are not such a far-fetched idea that I cannot conceive of their existence. On the contrary, I am eager to test the waters and see how something like this comes together, and I will be glad to contribute what I can to this project.